Abstract:

Communally created Web 2.0 content on the Internet has begun to compete with information provided by traditional gatekeeper institutions, such as academic journals, medical professionals, and large corporations. On the one hand, such gatekeepers need to understand the nature of this competition, as well as to try to ensure that the general public are not endangered by poor quality information. On the other hand, advocates of free and universal access to basic social services have argued that communal efforts can provide as good or better-quality versions of commonly needed resources. This dissertation arises from these needs to understand the nature and quality of information being produced on such websites. Website-oriented information quality (IQ) literature spans at least 15 different academic fields, a survey of which identified two types of IQ: perceptual and artifactual fitness-related, and representational accuracy and completeness-related. The current project studied websites in terms of all of these, except perceptual fitness.
This study may be the only of its kind to have targeted fansites: websites made by fans of a mass media franchise. Despite the Internet's becoming a primary means by which millions of people consume and co-produce their entertainment, little academic attention has been paid to the IQ of sites about the mass media. For this study, the four central non-studio-affiliated sites about a highly popular and fan-engaging science fiction television franchise, Stargate, were chosen, and their IQ examined across sites having different sizes as well as editorial and business models. As exhaustive of samples as possible were collected from each site. Based on 21 relevant variables from the IQ literature, four qualitative and 17 exploratory statistical analyses were conducted. Key findings include: five possibly new IQ criteria; smaller sites concerned more with pleasing connoisseuring fans than the general public; larger sites being targeted towards older users; professional editors serving their own interests more than users'; wikis' greater user freedom attracting more invested and balanced writers; for-profit sites being more imposing upon, and less protecting of, users than non-profit sites; and the emergence of common writing styles, themes, data fields, advertisement types, linking strategies, and page types.